The invention resides in a standardized Royal Jelly, a method of its extraction and the use thereof.
It is known that the workers of Apis mellifera generate, between their 9.sup.th and 15.sup.th days of life, a milk-like protein-rich feed juice (royal jelly) in their hypopharyngal glands and especially in the middle mandibular gland. This feed juice is used in small amounts for the original feeding of the whole breed in the egg-containing cells, (worker and drone cells). It is supplied in substantial amounts to the cell in which a queen is to develop whose only purpose is to reproduce. Royal jelly is the only food fed to the queen and is completely metabolized by her without excretion. It protects the queen from infection and gives her a life span of 50 times that of normal bees (inspite of the fact that her genes are identical to those of the worker bees). It also endows her with enormous reproductive capacity; up to two million offspring from the initial fertilization.
Royal jelly is also known to have interesting therapeutic effects on vertebrates, particularly in mammals and humans, such as:
protection from infections caused by gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. PA1 antitumor and antiviral effects, essentially without any zytotoxic effects on the host tissue.
There is considerable interest in processes for extracting substantial amounts of royal jelly for commercial distribution of the raw substance or stabilized forms prepared therefrom, as well as for the research and isolation of many effective substances which are generally unknown and which are present only in traces.
It has been found, however, that the therapeutic effects described above are altogether or partially uncertain; particularly the antiviral effects have been found to be limited and not clearly reproducible in-vitro or in-vivo. Different results have been obtained, even from the same substance sample. The impossibility to transfer from one testing system to another limits the research capabilities. The random, spectacular results achieved in clinical tests, particularly in cancer research, prove to be inconsistent. This inconsistency and non-transferability resulted in the discrediting of royal jelly, both as a therapeutic raw substance as well as a research substance in the search for new effective substances and their commercialization.
The inventor has found however, that suprisingly, the reason for the varying effects and losses of effects of the effective substances is not so much the result of deterioration caused by storage of the substances as it is caused by the extraction process presently in use.
For the gathering of royal jelly, the bee combs are provided with separation grids for the queen and with queen cell structures containing almost two dozen artificial queen cells. After 72 hours, the queen larvae are removed from the queen cells. The remaining milky suspension is sucked out in a rapid procedure by sucking in air via a narrowed tube and is directed onto a receptacle wall. The vacuum for this procedure is generated by a central pump which is capable of serving several work locations. The pump has a substantial suction capacity (like pumps for bovine milking machines). This results in a large volume of air passing through completely atomizing the milky royal jelly material. With extraction quantities being so minute (only 300 mg/queen cell), the extraction process and subsequent handling expose the raw substance to varying amounts of oxygen. This relationship is particularly detrimental in the extraction of the raw substance from worker and drone cells (containing only 10 mg/cell).
It is the object of the present invention to provide a method of gathering standardized royal jelly with consistently high antiviral properties and optimized other effectiveness.